


Composed

by JRaylin441



Series: Briareus [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Ed is super obnoxious, Gen, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, Poor Damon is just trying to live his life, alphonse is a saint, it's not going so well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 07:44:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7038985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JRaylin441/pseuds/JRaylin441
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damon is really just trying to live his life, but sorting through reports for the Eastern Command Center is a lot harder when Major Edward Elric is involved...</p><p> </p><p>  <i>What. Exactly. Made you think it was a good idea to write a report in red crayon? Never mind the stains and the cramped handwriting along with the complete. Disregard. For. The. Necessary. Details. This is the last straw. I can’t do it anymore.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Composed

**Author's Note:**

> And here we go with the second oneshot! A lot of these are going to be from the point of view of OCs, but I try to keep the focus on Ed, so I hope it's not too bad.

Damon Garver did not read the newspaper. Never had. Getting a job right out of school that involved the reading of endless reports on dull subjects could do that to a person. Eight hours a day spent in a dark room, bent over the handwritten scrawl of a hundred military dogs, and people expected him to spend more time outside of the job doing the same sort of thing? Besides, anything truly important would appear in the reports, and this way he could read the facts without worrying about propaganda getting thrown into the mix.

Of course, this way also meant that he had never heard of the People’s Alchemist.

Sure, he knew Edward Elric. How could he not? Major Elric was, in fact, the cause of a roughly biweekly migraine that would arrive neatly stacked into the manila folder labeled _Colonel Mustang_. The file would bulge with papers and Damon would gingerly reach towards it, praying that today wasn’t the day. Not yet.

The file had bulged with papers this morning and his prayers were left unanswered. There, amidst the neatly stacked paperwork and reports from Colonel Roy Mustang’s team, was the sheet of crumpled, stained paper. It was just wrinkled enough that it formed a blip in the orderly stack, pushing its neighbors to the sides and leaving little areas of space. Already, there was a buzzing pressure building behind Damon’s left eyebrow.

He would get it over with. He would read the damn report, and then file it away and never think about it again.

The problem was, Damon was still young. He had spent the night before out at the bar. His friends had dragged him there, but upon arriving he had discovered another, very enticing reason to stay. He had thought that waking up hung-over and sleep deprived was well worth the reward, but as he gazed down at the blip in the stack, he was no longer sure.

And then he took it out.

Crayon. Normally the reports were simply food stained and rumpled. Written in a messy blur and so inadequately descriptive that he had to spend another few hours researching what had gone on, simply so he could file the report correctly. Forget reading the newspaper, Damon was pretty sure that he could _write_ the newspaper by this point. The crayon, however, was a new step into hell, something that he hadn’t known was possible. The thick tip had smudged all the words together, so that the handwriting that usually required Damon to sit down with a microscope and a spare three hours was now rendered completely illegible, even on his best day. And this was hardly his best day.

Something snapped.

He was _not_ going to go through this again. No, Damon was going to march up to the Colonel right now and let him know that he had better control his subordinates. Because this was reaching a point of irritation that was making him contemplate a job as a journalist, and Damon didn’t even read the newspaper.

As he stormed his way toward the elevator, a small part of Damon felt guilty for what he was about to do. Mustang was actually a fairly stand-up guy, as far as the higher-ups went. Damon had spoken to him on more than one occasion, and had honestly enjoyed the experience. Also, he didn’t know it, but he had helped Damon win over women for the past few years. All it took was one drop of the name, and any woman in the city would look at him with new eyes, as if to say _I’ve heard about him. I wonder what you’re like, as his friend._

But this was beyond that now. Major Edward Elric had driven Damon to this.

The office was on the third floor, and light was much more prevalent here than in the stuffy filing room in the basement (he knew that he should have brought sunglasses). Hawkeye was sitting at her desk, seeming to survey the rest of the office as Falman, Feury, Havoc, and Breda worked furiously under her gaze. The door to the Colonel’s office was shut tight, and a boy was sitting on a chair outside it, clunking his shoes against the chair legs.

The boy had long gold hair and eyes that were similar in color to Hawkeye’s. Hawkeye wasn’t the sort of person to get knocked up and raise a kid on her own. There had to be a guy in her life. Well, there went the four-year bet that the secretaries downstairs had going, along with five months of work on Damon’s part. If he hadn’t already been on a mission, Damon would have taken a moment to lament the missed opportunity. As it was, Mustang’s office was _right there_ , and in only a few more seconds, he would be on his way to fixing the menace that was Edward Elric.

“Hey kid, move. I need to talk to the Colonel.” Damon was still too incensed to notice the fact that all work behind him came to an abrupt stop as Colonel Mustang’s men turned to watch the show.

“Yeah, well so do I, so you can just wait in line.” The pain behind Damon’s eye was growing by the second and this really wasn’t the time for this. He didn’t want to talk to a kid when he could be taking the step to finally make his job bearable again.

“What is this, bring your kid to work day? You can wait before you interview him for a school project. Now move it.”

The silence before had been anticipatory, but now it was shocked. The kid shot to his feet, fire blazing quite suddenly in his eyes, and was only stopped from leaping on Damon by the quick arm that appeared out of nowhere and latched onto his shoulder. Hawkeye. Somehow, the woman had made it across the room in time to avert the assault that had been pending, if only for a moment. The kid was chafing under her hand like it was a collar or a harness.

“Relax, Ed. You know that you’re young.” He didn’t change much, but at least it looked like he was done foaming at the mouth, so that was something. It would have been the end of it, actually, if Damon’s impaired mind wasn’t slowly putting the puzzle pieces together. The comfort level that Riza had with this boy. His blatant disregard toward the rules of social situations. She had called him Ed…

“Ed!” The interjection spilled from his lips as the pieces fit into place. The boy, who had sat back down at some point, though he was still kicking pissily at the chair legs, cut him a glance as if to say _what do you_ want _?_. “Is Major Edward Elric your father?” It was possible that Damon’s voice had twisted around the name as if it were some foul-tasting thing, but he would never admit that.

For a moment, the boy stared up at him as if contemplating exactly how he would go about removing Damon’s eyes and feeding them to him while still alive, but then he seemed to decide that he was more amused than angry. He let out a sardonic chuckle and reached into his pocket.

The silver pocket watch gleamed in his palm and everything was suddenly making a lot less sense. “I’m Edward Elric, dumbass.”

Damon had been distracted this whole conversation by the office behind him, containing the answers to fixing everything, but now his gaze focused laser-sharp onto the boy. Somehow, the shock of it all had knocked him off balance and drained off some of the anger. Then Edward Elric grinned the grin of someone who wasn’t sure just what they had done wrong but was sure they were going to enjoy it and the fury flooded back, crashing over his common sense and tinging his vision red.

“What. _Exactly_. Made you think it was a good idea to write a report in _red crayon_.” His hand was fisted in the front of Ed’s shirt and he had him shoved up against the wall, as if his hands were prepared to strangle this boy and when had that happened? “Never mind the _stains_ and the _cramped handwriting_ along with the _complete. Disregard. For. The. Necessary. Details_. This is the last straw. I can’t do it anymore.”

The fight finally seeped out of him and Damon experience a moment of panic as he realized that he had just physically assaulted and possibly emotionally traumatized a _kid_. Of course, it took one look at the kid to see that this was hardly the case. It looked more like Ed was resisting the urge to yawn while resting his back against the wall, completely supported by Damon’s hand. Damon let go.

“You good?” He should have been asking the question, but Ed was acting like this was all commonplace and to be expected. Damon managed a jerky nod.

“Thought the Bastard was the only one who read this shit. Makes sense that he isn’t, though. I shoulda thought of that earlier.” And that was probably the closest that Damon was going to get to an apology. It felt like more than he deserved. One more nod and Damon gave up on trying to understand how he had lost his cool _so badly_. The threatening migraine had fully bloomed into a rampaging elephant inside of his head and he felt like retreating back to the cool darkness of his office to take a nap.

Havoc looked like he was about to bust a gut trying to keep his laughter inside.

On the walk back down to the basement, it fully hit home what Damon had just done. He knew what Major Edward Elric had accomplished, hell, he had been the one to sort through the different successful missions and file them into some sort of order. Edward Elric, who had taken down mass murders, protected towns from ambushes, and revealed countless cases of corruption and deception throughout Amestris. Edward Elric who was, it turned out, somewhere around the age of twelve. Damon had heard stories of child soldiers, children who lost sight of anything resembling morals when faced with the terrible reality of their lives.

Damon should be dead. He should be dead twice over.

But somehow, Major Edward Elric had left him alive, and the contemplation of his most recent brush with death was bringing the rampaging elephant to a climax, so Damon curled up on the couch in his office, turned off the lights, and decided to stop thinking for the next few hours.

*~*~*

Damon reached for the folder, dread clenching his heart as he realized that it had been over two weeks since the Confrontation. He was long overdue for a report. Even so, there was no crumpled sheet making a divot in the otherwise flat stack of papers. What was taking so long?

Halfway down, he came across it.

Three pages, stapled together into a neat little stack. The handwriting was a little clumsy, yet it was clearly legible. The report itself was comprehensive and concise. If every report looked like this one, they wouldn’t need someone to do Damon’s job. And across the top of the page, was the neatly printed name: Edward Elric. It was like an entirely different person had written it.

Damon filed it away accordingly and grinned to himself for the rest of the day. He couldn’t put his finger on what the exact reason was, but he felt like he had just won some kind of competition.

*~*~*

Bonus:

“But Brother, it’s not fair that you make that man’s job so hard just to annoy the Colonel. Just write a nice report.”

“Dammit, Al, I wouldn’t have told you about it if I’d known you would try and make me do this.”

“Why not just rewrite the report. It never takes you very long anyway.”

“If it’s such an easy job, why don’t _you_ write it?!”

“You know that’s against the rules.”

“Since when have we ever cared about the rules?”


End file.
